Re-Thinking, Re-Focusing and Re-Energising how we Lead Innovation and Manage Design

You know the feeling when some everyday product lets you down. ‘I could have designed this better myself’, you think. But how many of us turn our thoughts into actions? James Dyson does. He is a man who likes to make things work better. With his research team he has developed products that have achieved sales of over £3 billion worldwide. Whilst at the Royal College of Art (1970) he designed the Sea Truck for Rotork.

This was intended to be the equivalent of a Land Rover, able to move equipment, stores and livestock between islands, etc.

The buyers/users of the Sea Truck tended to abuse the boat thinking its 6-inch draft made it indestructible... ( extracted from Against the Odds) "As a result they tended to ram it into rocks more often than was strictly good or wholesome.

As designers we knew that we could enhance the product by making it unpuncturable. And the best way to do that was to take our lead from those large plastic water pipes which will not even break if you hit them with a hammer..... the pipes would be bunged with what looked like plastic footballs,..

We bought a farmhouse.. in the Cotswolds. With drystone walls to be built.... I found myself spending a lot of time in the company of a wheel barrow... I discovered what a crummy piece of equipment it [ a navvy barrow] really was.

...It was off to France to test the Tube Boat - ....- where we needed to bung the polyethylene pipes, and where I learned how to mould unpuncturable low-density polyethylene into a sphere. And as I turned my first plasic sphere, I knew waht was happening and I said to myself "This is it matey. This is the answer to all my problems." A revolutionary wheel.

And the Ball Barrow was born

The frames of the Ball Barrow were sprayed with an epoxy powder which was then baked on. Much of the spray ended up on the conveyor and would be sucked onto a screen. Every hour the line stopped as the blocked screen was cleared. Our suppliers told us that big users had a cyclone installed to centrifuge the powder and collected at the bottom of a conical section.. but it was 30 feet high! And £75,000!

On the way home one night Dyson sketched the Cyclone on the roof of the local sawmill, climbed all over it to see how it worked,and used this knowledge to construct one of his own. As Against all Odds describes.. it worked! And this also was the inspired solution for the vacuum cleaner problem.. The Dyson cleaner that was the end result of Dyson observing observing how quickly existing bag vacuums lost their suction when he was using one at home.

It is this technology that has proved to be the platform for the Dyson successful growth.

But it is intriguing how each nugget of knowledge has been re-used on other user problems. It is just making the connections that is a necessary start. As to whether we should call James Dyson Inventive or Innovative....:

Inventive Merit... Relieves or avoids the constraints of existing ways of doing thingsInnovative Merit... Changes the life of the customer. It changes the life of the customer in some way or the world in which the customer experiences things.Conclusion.. both terms apply!

The Mail on Sunday included an article We have lift off: The quickest yacht in the world. Extract here:Is it a boat? is it a plane? No - it's something in between, that also happens to be very, very fast. Ian Stafford goes flying on the quickest yacht in the world "This is not a boat, nor a plane either. This is a magical flying carpet,2 says Alain Thébault, the man behind the Hydroptère, the world's fastest yacht. There's magic in the air even as we cast off from the Breton port of La Trinité-sur-Mer, overlooked by the ancient stones of Carnac, France's own Stonehenge. There's a flurry of strenuous hoisting and winding as the wind balloons the sails. The craft begins to accelerate. It cuts the waves faster and faster, the nose begins to lift… and then we're flying. It just keeps on going faster. The only sound from the sea beneath is the single hydrofoil blade cutting through the waves like a sword. Its far end shimmers underwater; thunderclouds of spray fill the air in its wake. Hydroptère throws up more water than a hundred jet-skis, but in total silence – except when the crew whoop for joy. This extraordinary trimaran is the result of 20 years of research, engineering and design, plus substantial backing from Swiss banker Thierry Lombard. It's a yacht made from carbon fibre and titanium that rises up on to "wings". Instead of ploughing through the waves, it glides over them. Once up to speed, only one of two hydrofoils at the end of each outer keel actually touches the sea. The drag is almost negligible. This is why it has already set two world speed records, over a nautical mile and 500m, and why it'll continue to redefine yachting speeds as we know them this summer. Watch out for the reports.and the article endsHydroptère is a personal obsession, a life's work born of one man's dream – but now that it's on the verge of breaking every record that matters, there are plenty of potential buyers. Does Thébault know how much the project has cost? "No," he replies. "With all the adjustments and innovations it's very difficult to say. I'd say many millions of euros." Would he ever sell? "We have had a few people approach us, but I have not even waited for a price, nor offered one, and discussions never take place." Why not? Thébault smiles and lets out another whoop of joy as Hydroptère nudges past 40 knots again and the Quiberon peninsula flashes by. "There are some things in life no amount of money can ever buy," he explains, with a broad grin. "You cannot put a price on living a dream."

If we refer to Maslow we can see that the yacht is all about the satisfaction of Alain Thébault's need for self-actualisation. He is incredibly fortunate to have, since 2006, sponsorship from Swiss banker Thierry Lombard. As the official site puts it

Born in 1962, under the sign of Virgo, half-mad or half-wise depending on the tides, Alain Thébault once had a dream: creating a flying boat.
In the sailing world, there are many Ulysses. Sailors are cunning people who know how to make it through the tempest and to use a bit of cunning with the technical and human elements in order to survive. But Alain Thébault is the only living Icarus among the oceanic skippers. He possesses a fever for invention, a scorn for danger and the need to burn himself under every sun. The skipper of l’Hydroptère, the “flying boat”, is a misunderstood person who likes nothing better than rile the crowds who doubt him. He is also a determined man who would fall 10 times and get back up 100 times. Finally, he is an agitator who has burnt his wings many times by provoking the anger in the political and business spheres. Pilote d’un rêve (Piloting a Dream), Alain Thébault, Flammarion March 2005, Libération

Maslow can play out at two extremes- a utilitarian view:

“If the only tool we have is a hammer then we tend to see every problem as a nail.”

Or a symbolic one:

“Excellence is the result of

caring more than others think is wise;

risking more than others think is safe;

dreaming more than others think is feasible and expecting more than other people think is possible.”

Recently the owner of my favourite coffee place told me that she was raising the price of coffee and scones by 10p! That means £3.15 for a coffee and scone... and we get a top-up too. At Starbucks, round the corner an equivalent coffee is £4.50 and there is no equivalent to the home made scone! The owner had told me that they had considered buying cheaper coffee, but decided that would ruin the experience, especially for the regulars. The Courtyard Café has a Unique Buying Tribe.. the core of which are regulars and the rest are attracted by the lunches, cakes and scones, all prepared and cooked on the premises from real ingredients. It is the needs and wants of the UBT that determines what the owners do not what the suppliers are doing.

One way of avoiding the Starbucks slide to 'commoditisation' that Howard Schultz wrote about in his famous memo is to concentrate on understanding your 'tribe' and working to satisfy their needs, especially unmet needs. The use of Kano thinking and the Design Pyramid to define a 'perfect' experience and discover gaps between that ideal and the actual. This will focus the Design Journey and Design Space activities on meeting consumer needs rather than fascinating 'stuff'; and our consumers? They are members of our Unique Buying Tribe... the people who may or do experience our products or services. They determine how successful we will be, as the power moves to them and thinking product-centric and Unique Selling Proposition becomes a dying art.

So what is your story, and who is telling it? You (USP-thinking)? Your consumers (UBT)?

A B(log)ramble: One of the challenges we face when presenting is that we have probably lived with the topic for a long time and have knowledge in depth and breadth (Garr Reynolds has more discussion of this). The challenge for our audiences is they are suffering from information overload- as Melanie McGrath puts it in Motel Nirvana-"information flows into us faster than we can bail it out again as neat packaged theories“. So one of the roles of a good-to-great presenter is to ask "What problem will my presentation help them address? Will it inspire them to act?"

When I am presenting I ask " How can I package my 'neat [and unique] packaged theory' and transfer it in an entertaining way that will enable my audience to actually do something with that information and knowledge afterwards?" Transferring knowledge is an interactive process, so delivering a monologue is not great for ensuring it happens. I exploit a framework of presenting called Beyond Bullet Points created by Cliff Atkinson. You can read about it here, or in the book. In essence Cliff's framework facilitates the rapid design of a seductive presentation, but only if you let go of old habits,,,

The beauty of this approach is that we, as presenters are forced to confront the setting, or context of our presentation; what is the role of the audience; what has changed to cause us to be concerned (A); where we want to be (our ambition/aspiration) (B); how might we bridge the gap/make the journey between A and B. Key points 1,2,3 (...4), are the enablers for the journey.

The first five slides on the storyboard are setting up the presentation and enables you to align the audience behind your approach to a particular challenge, what we might call introducing the package and capturing their interest.

This picture and the next uploaded on by jsc*. Used with thanks under CC.

The next slides are where you reveal the contents of the package, revealing a key point at a time.

Depending on the time we can just look at each sweet and hear a quick description; more time allows us to sample one in each quadrant; even more time allows us to reveal all that makes each quadrant allowing the tasters to develop a complete experience! Recalling that experience later should have those that have favourably 'bitten' into the experience to come back for more. What we don't want is the disconnection between the audience and the presenter revealed when you ask "How was the chocolate?"

In the ghosts of past successes I wrote of Giant Hairballs that snarl up creativity in organisations.. Corporate appropriateness comes from looking up to see The ghost of past successes but not backward to feel the inspiration, hard work and risk-taking that actually created that success. Managers that are creative leaders know how to tell those inspiring stories that energises the team to go off at tangents, to explore and discover- to become Teams from Heaven.

The challenge in organisations, whatever their size is to accept that risk-taking, confident that the team leadership and individual capabilities and dedication factor up to a big-hit innovation.

The business environment within which engineers and designers are
working is changing dramatically. The days of designing, making and
selling physical products are becoming
numbered as customers increasingly demand product performance and
through-life support services that meet their individual needs.

This lecture will explore how the demands on engineering design systems
are changing: from the need to support the design of shapes and
products through to support for the design and operation of networks of
organisations and the services that they deliver.

The actual lecture exceeded expectations as Prof. McKay took us on a journey across her landscape of discovery, highlighting the challenges of engineering teaching where students tend to be internally focussed on the 'problem'; conventional industrial design where the student is focussed on 'form' and the real world that needs designers who are integrators of hard and soft sciences. Moreover they need to do this integration over a long period working with products containing technology that may be obsolescent by the time they are in service and obsolete before they are retired.

Pixar atrium picture uploaded by Andrew Butts. Used with thanks under CC.

which, I believe, makes a case for turning out individuals from Professor Alison McKay 's Product Design BDes with some 'rough edges' rather than 'well-rounded' ones that slide into a slot in the corporate structure! Whilst good design is an integration of the Points of view of many disciplines, great design is the outcome of creative conflict between those disciplines. That requires 'attitude', which organisations find challenging. Brad Bird articulates it very well in the article and there is another interview here. I'll explore Brad Bird's interview and the lessons we can draw from them elsewhere.

ADDENDUM: This week's Economist print edition has an article Disney: Magic restored That analyses Disney's ups and downs over the past few years. Here is a relevant extract:

"What accounts for this renaissance? Mr Iger's management style is said
by many to have unlocked Disney's creativity. “There was already
creativity inside Disney, but Bob removed the barriers to it,” says
Peter Chernin, chief operating officer of News Corporation, a rival
media group. “Michael Eisner was all about his own creativity,” says
Stanley Gold, a former Disney board director who led a campaign to oust
Mr Eisner in 2004, referring to the way in which the former boss
meddled in the detail of Disney's parks and movies. In contrast, he
says, “Bob pushes creative decisions to the people below him.”

In addition, Mr Iger's acquisition of Pixar, a studio that insists on
creative originality, has sent a signal to people inside and outside
Disney. “A few years ago we weren't necessarily seen by the creative
community as the place to be,” says Tom Staggs, Disney's chief
financial officer, “but now that has changed and people want to work
here.” Mr Iger immediately put Pixar's top people in charge of Disney's
animation business, and last year he put an end to the practice of
making cheap direct-to-video sequels of old favourites, such as
“Cinderella II: Dreams Come True”—Disney's equivalent of frozen food.

One former Mouseketeer argues that Mr Iger cannot take much credit for
Disney's recent string of hits. “All the great new shows from Disney
were developed, and many of them launched, when Michael Eisner was
leading the company,” says David Hulbert, a former president of Walt
Disney Television International. “The TV
and studio creative cycle lasts several years, so we will have to wait
some time yet to see what Bob Iger's cautious, centralised and
consensual management style produces,” he adds....

....But its creative momentum and proven ability to extract value from its
hits means it can afford to feel more optimistic about the future than
most big media firms."

So maybe we are seeing what a great deal of great knowledge-creating organisation leaders do... Be autocratic about the goals but democratic about the means."

The trouble with new tools is that they often require little effort to use but some effort to exploit. Salman Rushdie, on a recent radio programme was asked how he found it when he started to write his novels using a PC rather than a pen. He replied that he had resisted the changeover as long as he could but then took the plunge and really worked at mastering the PC. When asked if it affected the quality of his work he replied "You buy a new pen and at first it writes its own sentences, but after a while you get used to it and you begin to write your own."

An interesting aspect is the possibilities afforded by the PC and its applications, if we are prepared to take the time to learn them, practice them and ultimately master them. In the words of Churchill, "we shape our buildings, and afterwards our
buildings shape us." (On October 28, 1943 at a meeting in the House of Lords). In a similar vein some 20 years later, Marshall McLuhan said: "we shape our tools and afterwards our tools
shape us." Peter Senge in his book "5th Discipline Handbook" discusses learning in the context of a system consisting of to a triangular Domain of Action (Guiding Ideas; Innovations in Infrastructure; Theory, Methods and Tools) in order to achieve change. For enduring change we need connect this with the Domain of enduring change (Attitudes and beliefs, skills and capabilities, awareness and sensibilities).

But ultimately learning is judged by results. Measuring those results can have an effect on the outcomes.
One can imagine that ultimately the word count per day might rise considerably as one abandons a pen and moves to a word processor. So as a crude measure we might say productivity has increased and pronounce the adoption of new technology as a success. However when the book reaches the market and is not as successful as the last 'penned' version we might argue that the fashion has changed and so we need to take a different slant on the plot. The real reason might be that we have only used the PC and not exploited it. The output has been faster and therefore against some measure we are more productive but the total result is ultimately less effective... The challenge is "What gets measured gets done" but unless we have the right measures in place we will not be able to direct our practice and learning in the right area. So we really need to think through what we are trying to achieve in order to specify the right critical success factors and key performance indicators... remembering that they are not the same... critical success factors are the drivers, the 'things' to be achieved; key performance indicators tell you how your are travelling towards the goal.

If we need 16 highly experienced stress engineers in order to achieve our goals then a kpi that states it is the number of people recruited in the next quarter (and your bonus depends on it!) then the recruiters will find a way of getting all 16 on-board even if we have to massage the standards a little. If the kpi is to recruit the 16 best engineers then the time-scale will be challenging as well as the remuneration (or working environment). Remember... "What gets measured gets done".... so if the objective is to obtain airworthiness clearance by the end of the next two quarters we can put a plan in place that may involve building a global team of partners with the required technology, infrastructure and relationships that can support and enable the activities 24hrs/day, 6 days a week, and come in at or below the budget and early!

During the late 1980's and early 90's the changing socio-economic factors driven by globalisation in general, and regionalisation in particular had a great impact on the rules that conditioned the framework of new product design. I was involved in plastic packaging design at the time and realised something was going on when the task of applying the new rules of blow moulded pack design led to the destruction of the aesthetic designs devised by external packaging design houses and marketing working in concert. Diagnostic activity made us realise that the rules of the game were changing rapidly. The rules traditionally used by design houses with the support of marketing meant the gap between what was needed and what was offered was increasing over time; it was inevitable that how we designed and developed the packaging needed to change. The additional unknown was that our group was unsure of the new rule book as it was an emergent situation changing over time as we iterated around the challenge. In effect we had moved from a set of projects that, if plotted on the Design Diamond matrix would have been a point in 'painting-by-numbers', for manufacture and 'making a movie' in marketing development, to a 'sometimes a quest', but often stumbling in a 'fog' even challenging the aesthetic- a situation we thought of as 'everything to play for'.

We realised that we could classify our challenges as 3 sets of factors:

We used the diagram as a tool to explain what is going on to all the people involved in making the project a success.

Design houses tended to live in the aesthetic space, whilst marketing inhabited the geometric space(but at a local level).

We acted as a proxy for the people affected by the factors in structural space..... manufacturing, supply chain, in-use, etc.

Many of the factors live in more than one space. For example, ergonomics can be influenced by any of the factors. Structural integrity can be compromised by aesthetics; aesthetics by geometrics and so on. We needed to move into and play in the deltoid shape where all 3 spaces overlap so we can search for optimal trade-offs.

Another change catalysed by the pressures of design rework resulting of the destruction of the 'old' rules was the start of earlier inclusion of key players in the total product innovation process. This meant that my team's impact moved from being involved after the designs were agreed between marketing and the design house to being actively involved in the ideas phase first as referees with the new rule book and then as orchestrators of the new interactions.

We developed this approach into Design4Excellence; nobody was keen on the name so I now call it Design@The_Edge.

Fast forward to the morning of 12th April, I was browsing the Daily Telegraph magazine in the Courtyard Coffee House and found this article:

High Concept : In her new book 'Process' tracing 50 classic designs from idea to finished object, Jennifer Hudson describes the development of Konstantin Grcic's Miura bar stool from rough sketch to plastic wonder.

Here is an extract from the article:

"Grcic is an intuitive designer. Once he has made a model, he can assess its form and aesthetics straight away.; whether it has potential or is feasible, and where the design could lead. For example one of the features of Miura is that it stacks, but it was not conceived this way. It was only after creating a built structure that Grcic saw that it would take a slight adjustment to add this feature. Once Grcic had established the overall geometry, the computer was used for modelling the Miura's complex freeform surfaces. During this phase, heavy use was made of rapid prototyping facilities. CAD (Computer-aided design) data was fed into laser-sintering machine making it possible to produce a series of life-size models.

Grcic develops prototypes from an early stage, first to check proportion and then to make ergonomic, structural and aesthetic tests. Software may appear to model a form perfectly, but it is only when it is viewed in 1:1 that physical problems become apparent. This was particularly the case with Miura, whose structural complexity, soft surfaces and refined curves were difficult to judge on the computer. \once the full-size model was created, the stool was judged top-heavy. Parallel to the design process, CAD files were forwarded to the structural engineers, who performed both static and dynamic stress simulation to test that the stool was safe and stable.

After a year of development, in 2005 Miura was considered ready for production. Initially it was thought the stool would need to be gas-injection moulded, as the thicker sections such as the legs, needed to be hollow. This would have involved a very expensive mould. After further consultation an alternative plastics engineer was found who could inject the plastic solid. It was a risk, as so much plastic, once ejected from the mould, could distort during cooling. the radical injection technique needed fine adjustment and a lot of pressure, but it eventually succeeded in cutting production costs considerably."

The tool is made from steel in five parts to mould the complex geometry of the stool.

I assume the pictures in The Telegraph Magazine are from Jennifer Hudson's book.

To watch a interview with Konstantin Grcic at his exhibition This Way Up click this link to watch Flash video in new movie window. There is biography on his web site including this extract:

"Konstantin Grcic creates industrial products widely described as pared
down, simple, minimalist. What sets him apart from the minimalism in fashionable currency today is that he defines function in human terms,
combining maximum formal strictness with considerable mental acuity and humour."

The lessons learned in using our triumvirate of factors was that people could take on-board the evolving factors if we treated the evolving set as tacit knowledge that needed to be transferred through face to face discussion around the diagram; not as a list. We can also note how similar the spaces and factors apply in a more general sense as exemplified by the practices of Konstantin Grcic and his team.. the video also reminded me of Charles and Ray Eames way of working with clients and technology... but that's another story.

If creativity is "just connecting things" then let's face it... this maybe a creative B(log)ramble! I have just read Design Sojourn's post entitled Designing Products that will work with Web 2.0 strategies. That got me thinking about using Web 2.0 to allow for distributed design and development of innovative new ways of innovating new products, services and experiences! I looked at O'Reilly's Web 2.0 blog that labelled the second avalanche of web activities as Web 2.0, which got me thinking about the lost chapters in Rich Gold's Plenitude... the 3 Spaces I referred to here. Gold refers to the...

"Desire: To make the world damp. To turn the world into a giant text chat room.

The Desire of ubiquitous computing was to overlay on top of this Wet environment a Damp one. In the middle of a wet meeting you would be able to email a colleague in another room, another building or around the world. In the middle of eating lunch at the company cafeteria with your office mates, one would be able to tap out an email message and send it off to your wife, or husband, or to your boss, or to your rival.

At the millennium, we were facing a tough journey across the competitive landscape. Accelerating avalanches of change -digitisation, globalisation and spiritualisation -were engulfing those who were not agile enough to exploit insights, creativity, innovation and design. In our case the teams making the journey were evolving from local, through regional, to global cross-functional, trans-organisational people distributed in time and space. My insight was that projects went off-course, even if people were originally aligned with the project vision and goals....as new information became available to distributed individuals and there was a delay in interpreting it in a group sense there was alignment drift and actions become discordant with the overall theme. Any software, systems and process that can help increase opportunities for collaboration and minimise vision decay would be worth looking at. Groove Networks had just announced Groove, described as collaboration software for ad-hoc workgroups, but experience had shown that just acquiring a group tool does not mean it will transform the culture of the organisation.

John Burkhadt wrote"....... I hadn't realized how much I depend on Groove now. It has become fundamental in the way I get work done.

For example, I work closely with another engineer.
I'm constantly sending him messages and chatting. Often we're in
real-time and we'll have a chat window open and we're debugging stuff
and dropping new binaries in the space. We can do so much together so
quickly that it becomes natural and the tool is suddenly transparent.
I think it got so transparent for me that I took it for granted.

Groove takes some getting used to. And it takes some effort.

Groove is not just technology, but its also centred around people. It takes effort from both fronts. Just because you have some collaboration software doesn't mean you suddenly know how to collaborate online. It takes some practice. But the payoff can be huge. I can't imagine life without Groove..."

We decided to try Groove (this is early 2001) on a distributed project. The operation of the project taught us that tools do not adopt people ... the people adopt the tools and to do that they need absolute clarity on the pain and benefits of adoption. Adoption only brings benefits when people feel that choosing the tool was an enlightened act; using the tool was not too mind bending; exploiting the tool was a very positive experience. Bill Jensen's CLEAR behavioural communication model is a useful starting point for effective thinking and acting... but he suggests that most people will stop using CLEAR after a couple of months!

Certainly using Groove let alone exploiting it turned out to be a challenge that we tried over a long period on a few key projects. We soon realised that Groove is a platform. We could reference documents, do email, instant messaging. We wanted to have a sketching facility to support design activities and found a simple tool that had been created as a plug-in which was useful. NetMeeting as a standalone application was, at that time a challenge as we could not cross corporate firewalls..and it was difficult to keep addresses. However we found that using it as a plug-in gave us Groove security plus a way across firewalls, linking our trans-organisational teams! Another plug-in worked like Skype, and then we embedded ALIAS PortfolioWall. After the tests we determined that clear articulation of potential benefits to the team users was key to getting attention (case studies helped). Web-based training facilitated getting people on board.. flexible tool "add-ining" was useful to enhanced utility as we discovered emerging opportunity. But at the end of the day IT support and senior executive leadership was essential. Where these were not available people lost enthusiasm and project benefits were brushed aside by political correctness... who determines and what triggers individual bonuses? Doesn't mean decisions were wrong (corporate values) but may not be in the interests of creativity, innovation and good design in a changing world. Groove has moved on and is now in Office 2007 as Groove 2007.

"As quickly and easily as word-processing programs alter text and spreadsheet software manipulates numbers, these “design processors” enable instant iteration in the pursuit of innovation. As networks link previously disparate parts of the organisation with each other, with key suppliers, and with customers, “design processing networks” create new opportunities for collaborative iteration both between firms and within them. Iterative capital becomes an essential investment for firms managing strategic alliances and supply chains."

Strong platform of understanding,aShared vision and live in a Creative climate; with shared Ownership of ideas, develop a Resilience to setbacks and include people who are Network activators and as a total team...

Learn from experience

So is Web 2.0 the answer.. or part of the answer

if we regard it as the gravitational core.. a platform then we need to be able to operate to expand our user insights by using the iterative capital generative capability of web 2.0 -based philosophies and tools to generate a suite of tools that facilitate and enable the potential for creative teams to form... to coalesce around an insight, idea, concept and make it into a winning experience in terms of how 'things' are done and what 'things' become. We need a SpaceBook that facilitates teams (extended and core) to seriously play and create new things that have value.. that value potential being created by understanding the intersection of need and technology earlier in the process.

Certainly Web 2.0 can be a platform for superior Design and Innovation networks which I have discussed here... whilst this is a basic model it will be populated with knowledgeable detailing which is informed by the interaction of the key organisation's culture internally and externally.... which may be the key to success or failure in the longer term.

Fritjof Capra inThe Hidden Connectionswrites that Culture is created and sustained by a network (form) of communications (process), in which meaning is generated. Culture’s material embodiments (matter) include artefacts, and written matter through which meaning is passed from group to group over time.

To truly exploit the potential of new and emergent tools, technologies and processes people that make up the culture and its organisations must learn to do things differently in order to generate artefacts, written matter, etc. that make new meaning... and this takes time.

To facilitate this artefact building we need social interaction and co-ordination; and tools that help the group do the things they need to do. One of the beauties of network-centric tools is that one can observe the activity that takes place and see who is more active, or less active in the chaotic interactions that make up design and innovation and then ask people "Why?" in order to enquire "Why do you spend a lot of time or hardly any time?" Of course it does need to be empathic enquiry in order to learn what is going on rather than direct enquiry which may elicit reactive group-speak that does not add to the knowledge for action.So maybe Design Spacebook is what we build; maybe Facebook is the platform. So all we need do is decide what we want to build on it! But we need to remember that to use social systems in an innovative way we need to support not only the processes of networking and negotiation, but also of enabling. Enabling the development of competences around goals and tasks is a leadership skill; deploying leadership enables members to strive to be the right people for the task, doing whatever it takes to achieve!

About ten years ago I got really frustrated that so many new product development projects were failing to make it through the funnel; one design house we worked with had been commissioned to work on 21 projects, only one of which made it to market and most of them failing well into the capability phase.

To utilise a rich soup of tacit and explicit knowledge I worked with a couple of collaborators to develop tools for the new millennium (I can say that now, but originally it was to address our dis-functional team working and the low hit rate of successful new projects).

The Design Pyramid evolved from a discussion about satisfying consumer needs and how Maslow had researched an put forward the hypothesis of a hierarchy of needs. We consulted his work and came up with this:

We realised we could translate the levels into understanding the consumer experience of the total product by answering a simple question: "What are they looking for?":

Starting at the lowest level we can express "What are they looking for?" in terms of the consumer's experiences and demands, for instance:

I
want it when and where I need it [function]

I
want to be able to rely on it [reliability]

I
want it to be simple and easy to use [engagement]

I
want to like it and relate to it [personality]

I
want it to say something about me [icon]

… and I want to love it!

We can begin to develop a deeper understanding of how our total product/service is satisfying or exceeding consumer expectations by looking at each level of the experience and the contribution made by the technology, packaging system and communication.

We may unearth some really interesting consumer insights tand begin to map them onto the Consumer Experience face.

We can then look at how the consumer experience is constrained or enabled by the other faces.

As we discover the possibilities of new and different technologies we can look at the enablers and constraints that they may offer. We can look at how we wrap the technology in a useful and pleasing form or packaging system.

Also we can look at the affect of existing or new communication channels and the way we exploit them, with the affordances of the other pyramid faces, etc.

We can also ask ourselves "What is an excellent product?" which enables
us to explore the mapping of excellence versus what is available now,
identifying the gaps between them.

So using Design Space ensures the team, in a clear and practical manner, understands, evaluates and optimises the relationship between the Consumer Experience, Technology, Packaging System and Communication in order to define a portfolio of opportunities for closing the gap between the current product and an excellent product. Services can be approached in a similar manner.

Although Maslow originally asserted that people satisfied their lower level needs, starting at the lowest level, before moving up, it has become apparent that individuals actually make quite complex trade-offs across levels.

If we deconstruct the hierarchy and think of it as three sets or spheres of needs:

then we get a better perspective of the consumers trade-offs going on between the material and social needs and the needs of personal growth. We reach a decision by consciously or unconsciously making trade-offs between our various needs and wants, so we can regard our needs - material, social and personal growth - as overlapping and interacting:

Hence the in spite of reviews that heap praise on product Y for having more features and performance than product X (more than meets people's material expectations)... droves of consumers actually buy X because it more than meets their social and personal expectations. This also makes it pretty difficult for the producer of Y to change direction and put together an offer that the consumer finds attractive and authentic and more particularly do it again and again - think RAZR. (NOTE: the producer needs to change as well as the product stream!)

Using Design Pyramid helps uncover the gap between what the experience the consumer may want and need compared with what we actually offer; and then allows us to look for gap-closing ideas, concepts, prototypes, stories, etc., using Design Space to ensure we are exploring the maximum amount of territory to optimise our solutions.

This picture sums up the innovation imperative very nicely...They are stating that If you really know your customers; create products and services that meet their needs, delighting their senses then you are well on the way to making sure that they will keep coming back to you.Little Springs describe themselves as:"Specializing in the practice of user-centered design for the mobile industry, Little Springs Design understands the needs of your business and customers. We bring our knowledge of the user, their needs in design, and the potentials of technology to you."Chapter 1 of Electric Dreams: designing for the digital age, written by David Redhead in 2004, opens with a quote from Tim Brown of IDEO:"Once design was about designing objects. Now it's about anticipating behaviours. Designers need to be film directors rather than sculptors."Designing Interactions by Bill Moggridge, founder of IDEO, was published late 2006 with an introduction by Gillian Crampton Smith. She says, in a section called Designing for Everyday Life:

"Twenty years ago, when personal computers were first becoming popular, they were mostly used as professional tools, or games machines for teenagers........We've come to a stage when computer technology needs to be designed as part of everyday culture, so that it's beautiful and intriguing, so that it has emotive as well as functional qualities.....It [the book] describes the challenges designers face in making this powerful technology fit easily into people's everyday lives , rather than forcing their lives to fit the dictates of technology."

which just reinforces what the headline picture describes... but how to do it for everyday objects and activities?

The good news is technology enables us to collect and share information; to interact around it and derive more interesting insights that can drive our innovation endeavours.

The other bit of good news is we can probably make a start with what we know and design activities to uncover what we need to know, and don't already know, thus planning activities that close that gap.

An interesting development last night was a radio discussion on the Chris Evans Drivetime show of the arrangement between the BBC and Nintendo to ensure availability of the iPlayer on the Wii box. In the blog

Wii
becomes home of online video there is an explanation of why the Nintendo box came first when conventional logic might favour the Xbox or Playstation. Read the blog for a fuller explanation that starts

"According to the Beeb's Erik Huggers it's because Sony and Microsoft wanted to "control" the iPlayer.

He said: 'If you want to get on the PlayStation or Xbox, they want
control of the look, the feel and the experience; they want it done
within their shop, and their shop only.' ......

What's more interesting is that the BBC's work with Nintendo has gone a
step closer to achieving what many companies are working at - namely,
bridging the gap between the web and the TV."

On the programme Erik Huggers explained that there are 2.5m Wii consoles in UK many belonging to people that are not hard core gamers, spreading across the ages from young to old, so it was a profile more likely to be interested in the iPlayer's benefits. Nintendo will make a small one off charge for the iPlayer channel subscription.

The iPlayer is also available on the iPhone Touch and iPhone, discussed here, which is intriguing given the claims and counter-claims about closed and open systems.. maybe there is another layer called closed and open thinking? Or even closed and open behaviour?

In other words really knowing your customers; creating products and services that meet their
needs, delighting their senses so you are well on the way to making
sure that they will keep coming back to you.